Sparks Fly || A George Weasley Story

Year 3: Down the Rabbit Hole

A week had passed since the Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff game, and it didn't bother me anymore. (Except for whenever I saw Cedric and Cho flirting with one another in the halls, or when I see Roger Davies' stupid face at any time during the day, but that was completely besides the point.) Something that was bothering me was the fact that this would be pretty much the third weekend in a row that I had to miss out on going to Hogsmeade with everyone else.

The castle was practically empty except for a few teachers that stuck around and the ghost that seemed confined to the stony halls, and well... the three of us. 

We were out in the greenhouses, sweeping, repotting, scrubbing, organizing, and moving plants and huge bags of potting soil without magic because someone had snitched on how we cleaned the potions classroom, and I supposed that it was Peeves. Just because we didn't see him, didn't mean that he wasn't there. He seemed to always be there, especially when you didn't want him to be.

Even if we were allowed to use magic, I wouldn't. Right now, my wand was wrapped up in my hair so that it was pulled back from my face and off my neck as much as possible. It may have been January, but with all of this manual labor, being in the huge glass building felt like trudging around in a space heater.

I wiped sweat from my brow, attempting to tuck stray curls back behind my ear. I had been trying to clean around this venomous tentacula plant for what felt like hours now, but between trying to dodge its vines and clean the table underneath it, I had somehow just created a bigger mess than I started with.

"Fine, I don't care enough for this," I huffed, throwing my cloth down on the table next to the feisty plant and stomped away.

"You're giving up that easy? I thought you had a little more fight in you than that," Fred laughed, but it came out as more of the wheeze as he picked up a huge bag of soil.

I rushed over to help him, so he didn't drop it and spill it all over the place, "You try fighting with a venomous tentacula without magic and see how long it takes you to give up, Weasley."

We dropped the bag on the table with a loud sigh of relief and a billowing cloud of dust. I wiped my hands on my jeans, on old pair that had been mended with patches from so many different fabrics they could barely be called jeans anymore, as George walked in from the next greenhouse over with a stack of terracotta pots in his hands. At first, I couldn't see his face over the insane stack, but he soon popped his head around the side, a splotch of dirt smeared across his smiling cheek.

What he could possibly be smiling about eluded me, but if he was happy to be out here doing all of the chores that Professor Sprout had neglected over the past few months...or past few years, more power to him. I wasn't going to be the one to rain on his parade.

He began lining up the pots, two at a time along the shelf that was at about waist level on him, getting them ready for us to fill with soil. The pots would end up on the table, but with all the moving about in here, the table had gotten dirty again once we cleaned it the first time, so we were going to clean it again at the end before we put the soil-filled pots down for her class on Monday.

Fred ripped open the bag of soil, sending a good amount rolling across the table and falling onto the floor. He grabbed some in his hands before making his way across the room, dropping most of it on the floor before he even got to where George was standing only three feet away. I rolled my eyes and laughed, grabbing one of the spare, and much smaller, pots from the shelf and scooped the soil into it.

"That is a much better idea," Fred said, scratching at his nose and smearing dirt across it.

"You say that like you're surprised," I rolled my eyes, trying to wipe the dirt off of his nose, but giving up when it did nothing but smudge.